58 Responses

The other bug bear with MMP; is the lists or rather the non democratic way some of them are picked/rankedMaybe a way to help would be to encourage (by law) more voters to be registered to the parties who could then do the ranking in primaries before an electionThis would whip up more interest in the parties and the electionThe other plus would be a chance for parties to solve their financial problems by having a registration fee, hopefully low enough for some of us to pick the list in more than one party!Win, win all round

Rather than 1/120th, use half of what it takes to get 2 seats. Not d'Hondt where you make all the small parties smaller (because the little parties work better in our parliamentary system if they're a bit bigger), just keep the micro-parties from further splitting to gain representation.

Anyhoo, that's 14,654 last election, which is roughly what electorate MPs get in on anyway (30-35% of ~50k). 0.625%, 1/160th. Gets the odd wonk and pervert a seat over the years, but I doubt Bill and Ben would've run if they could've won a seat, and it would've kept the Christian groups out of United Future.

Anyway, the nutter angle for the threshold is bogus, as when the big parties have more ways to make a majority, the little parties have less power, and the Nats and Labs totally work together to keep them out already (like the opposition speaker we had for some years there).

Rather than 1/120th, use half of what it takes to get 2 seats. Not d’Hondt where you make all the small parties smaller (because the little parties work better in our parliamentary system if they’re a bit bigger), just keep the micro-parties from further splitting to gain representation.

Anyhoo, that’s 14,654 last election, which is roughly what electorate MPs get in on anyway (30-35% of ~50k). 0.625%, 1/160th.

I imagine we'd just used modified Sainte-Laguë. Perhaps having the first divisor as 1.4 or 1.5 instead of 1. It's not too far off what you suggest.

Also, at the last election, well over half of our electorate MPs were elected with absolute majorities.

I think it should be a threshold of the quota needed to win two list seats, so that in order to get MPs, a party would need enough support to be an actual movement (albeit small) rather than a personal vanity party.

That is an interesting idea…as someone who is (and whose family are) long timeLabour supporters, it might even encourage some of us to participate in the democratic process at a local level.

I tried this, nearly 40 years ago, on the Coast. The rampant anti-feminism & and screechy homophobia (I wasnt but had to be after refusing breast-grabbing opportunities…) put me off for– well life, until now-

I like to think of it as the 'Trojan Horse" rule - where you send an innocent looking electorate MP to parliament, and then a bunch of list MPs sneak out of them when you're not looking!

Anyway, under MMP there are many other of situations where some voters are given more power than others. For example;- Maori party voters got to send some extra labour MPs to parliament as overhangers. ;)- 121 voters get to decide amongst themselves who forms the government, and those same voters (sans the speaker and the opposition) get to decide what all of our laws should be.- And that's assuming that the 1 voter with an overriding vote doesn't veto any of them!

PS: Had you genuinely never heard people complaining that voters in Epsom (or Tauranga, or Coromandel) were given too much power because of this rule? I'd thought that was the main objection to it!

PS: Had you genuinely never heard people complaining that voters in Epsom (or Tauranga, or Coromandel) were given too much power because of this rule? I’d thought that was the main objection to it!

Yes. Whenever I heard the complaint it was never about the voters. People complained that ACT was only in Parliament because Rodney won Epsom, and people complained that ACT was only in Parliament because National l made a deal with Rodney in Epsom (which isn't true, at least for the first time). But no-one complained that it meant voters in Epsom had more power than other voters.

p.s. since changes to Standing Orders following the introduction of MMP, the Speaker now gets a vote in Parliament.

But no-one complained that it meant voters in Epsom had more power than other voters.

Au contraire!

It's unfair, IMO, against those parties (and suppo[r]ters thereof) that have broad, rather than concentrated, support and it encourages gaming of the system because it rewards with greater power the voters in electorates that vote in a Hide, Dunne, or Anderton.- 3410, 13th April 2010

Quite. However, if you look a little further down, you will note that by that time, I had already changed my mind, so your observation came after the same observation from someone else that changed my mind. If only you'd been earlier, this post could have been dedicated to you!

If a politician is a member of a real political party, then if they want their ideas enacted, they need to persuade caucus (and support parties) of their validity. If they want to be a minister, they need to convince the leader/caucus of their personal merit.

If they're a one-man-band, they can often get these things just by turning up and agreeing to confidence and supply.

So a vanity candidate gets super-representation in return for a small number of votes concentrated in one place - this contrasts with the influence a real party gets with hundreds of thousands of votes from all over the nation.